There's a strong metaphor in here somewhere about the nature of the universe...

Gravitational waves that would've formed during the Big Bang's "inflation" were theorized in 1980, but earlier this year a team announced that they'd found proof of the waves' existence, which would be strong evidence in support of the Big Bang. Since then, the discovery has faced a lot of scientific opposition, and new research shows it may have just detected dust in the wind magnetically aligned patterns.

Well, this is absolutely beautiful.

Yesterday Stanford announced that the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation and gravitational waves may have been found. Chao-Lin Kuo, designer of the BICEP-2 detector that made the breakthrough, went to personally surprise Father of Inflation Andre Linde with the news that his life's work had just been validated. Beware: tearjerker territory.

If you've got any time to spare between avoiding getting eaten and making babies.

It's hard for humans to understand how the universe began, because it all started from a point where the laws of the universe as we know it and the measurements we use to understand it break down. This animation will help you get a better handle on the the parts of the Big Bang that we can currently explain.

It's a well known fact that children ask the best questions about science. For evidence of this, you need look no further than a question posed by an 11-year-old to physicist John Cramer almost a decade ago: Is there any recording of the sound of the Big Bang? The question got Cramer wondering if he could recreate an approximation of the sound of the Big Bang, so that's just what he did. Using data about the background radiation levels of the universe and translating those heat levels to sound waves, Cramer offered the first approximation of the sound that would have rung throughout the newborn universe in the millennia following the Big Bang. Now, thanks to new data from the Planck telescope, Cramer has been able to remaster the original sounds of the universe into a high-fidelity special edition, and you can take a listen below.

she blinded me with science

Also, there is just no way you can measure Force sensitivity with a blood test. I refuse to accept that. George Lucas, you've tricked me for the last time.
Physics students at the University of Leicester took it upon themselves to discover what the view from a spaceship traveling near the speed of light would actually look like. And… well, it's the right side of the image up above. Just a blurry circular gradient. Bummer.
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Physicists at the University of Melbourne have proposed a new way of looking at the origins of our universe, suggesting that everything that is came not from a Big Bang, but a Big Chill. The team, led by researcher James Quach, suggests that rather than a highly compressed universe exploding outwards in a huge release of energy, the universe as we know it instead coalesced from amorphous energy into its current crystallized form, like water freezing into ice.Read More

As far as our understanding of the universe goes, everything started with the big bang which jump started existence. However, only the three lightest elements -- hydrogen, helium, and lithium -- were produced during the big bang itself and all the rest were formed in the nuclear furnaces within stars. Scientists had theorized that somewhere in the universe, untouched pockets of the very first elements should still exist undiluted by heavier elements.
Now, astronomers think they've found two such pristine gas clouds some 12 billion light years away in the constellations Leo and Ursa Major.

Those of us in the general public like to think of the Big Bang as the beginning of everything; in the beginning, there was nothing, then there was the Big Bang. But new theories of the Universe's creation suggest that not only is this not the case, and might suggest that a special class of black holes in this Universe are actually older than the Big Bang.
I'll give you a minute to take that in.
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